[Talk-us] State ref tags on ways

Martijn van Exel martijn at openstreetmap.us
Fri Mar 28 12:55:11 UTC 2014


Hi all, been following the thread, just hadn't yet taken the time to write.

Part of the confusion is the lack of a 'definitive' wiki page. Here
are some links, partly contradicting each other:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States_roads_tagging
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States_Road_Classification
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/US_highway_signs

If we can direct some of the energy exposed in this thread in
consolidating / cleaning up these pages, then perhaps this discussion
won't recur as much in the future. Here's my take, mostly reiterating
what is already mentioned by some before:

* Relations using network= and ref= are the preferred way of capturing
route information, not ref= on individual ways. The relation pages[1]
can help.
* The hierarchy used in network= is US:I for interstates, / US:[2
letter state ISO] for state routes, and US:[2 letter state
ISO]:[County / parish / borough name] for county level routes.
* the ref= on relations only contains the number. Any data consumer
composes the full route shield / name from the network and the ref
tags.
* We don't quite know how to deal with bannered routes yet.
* Renderers affect how people map whether we like it or not, so
ideally we should have a very visible renderer that follows these
conventions.

Once things settle down after SOTM US, I am willing to commit some
more time to getting a really nice US tile server up and visible on
map.openstreetmap.org (or something similar).

[1] http://maproulette.org/relationpages

On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 4:04 AM, Minh Nguyen
<minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us> wrote:
> On 23:53 2014-03-27, Elliott Plack wrote:
>>
>> Interesting note about this in Maryland. My friend Mike showed me that
>> some mappers have been using the *county* route numbers on some county
>> roads in Maryland. All county roads in MD have a 4 digit number that
>> starts with CO, like CO1150. CO is also the state abbr. for Colorado.
>> Chaos ensues on the renders that show shields when people do this in MD.
>> Check out the Colorado shields in Maryland on Mapquest Open. That's sure
>> to confuse people.
>>
>> http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=12/38.2659/-76.5211&layers=Q
>>
>> For this reason, I advocate for the US:MD:CO reference someone mentioned.
>
>
> Ouch. Counties in Ohio are a mix of CR 123, C-123, CH 123, and yes, CO 123.
> State routes don't show up at all because we use the SR 123 format. New
> mappers sometimes change the ref tags specifically because of MapQuest.
>
> Make sure to use network=US:MD:County_Name on the route relations and, if
> these county routes have shields, file a bug to get the shield renderer to
> support them. [1] Hopefully someday MapQuest will fix their stylesheet. :-)
>
> [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/osm-shields
>
> --
> minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us
>
>
>
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-- 
Martijn van Exel
President, US Chapter
OpenStreetMap
http://openstreetmap.us/
http://osm.org/



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